The Serpent of Stars Read Online Free PDF Page B

villages, all closed up like startled tortoises. Everything was dead. The one with the pack mule behind and the one with the pack mule ahead came up to me on aching feet. We remained there, listening to the great dust resettling.
    The one from up front said, “The boss has passed Villeneuve-les-Orges. That’s what a cart driver told me.”
    Or maybe:

    â€œThey told me that the boss is farther than Saint-Raphaël-des-Roches, in the Luberon valley.”
    And all at once, I despaired of this great land, of all this country that had to pass under our feet. When I slept, I dreamed of the ball of the earth, this great ball of the earth, and I had to straddle it with my legs wide apart like they do with wooden balls in the circus, and I was split in two up through my stomach and chest.
    Sometimes, the one from behind said, “The mas! . . .”
    He said no more, and he kept tasting these words on his lips, because he had left a lover behind there.
    And so I thought of the mas as something lost in the depths of time, under layers and layers of rotting forests that had been dead for a hundred million turns of the earth.
    Then we set off again, getting underway with no order. Or rather, on a silent order coming on the wings of the air. The sheep rose, the mules rose, we had to follow. And we began walking again over the wide earth in the roiling dust.
    And so I went, thinking of nothing but the suffering of my flesh, until it brought me to tears, nothing but this great spine of fatigue running through me, until evening, when we made a twelve-hour-long stop in a village as cool and leafy as a peach on a tree. My two companions slept. As soon as the noise died down, and then its echo in the leaves of the high elms, I heard the song of the fountains. Water!
    It was a beautiful fountain, flat-nosed as a bee. It spoke out of three mouths at once, three long stories of water full of watercress, of fish, eel, and frogs; it spoke of lovely footbaths and of a long open-mouthed drink.
    I was leaving when a lamb leaned against my legs. It was covered
with snot and couldn’t open its muzzle, blind with mucous. Its head was only a block of mortar and it was looking for the spring by knocking its gourd of a skull along the coping.
    So I took it in my arms, washed it, and gave it water to suck by filling my hand and making a teat with my thumb. Then I let it go, and it moved away toward its mother, water splattering in the sun.
    And that night, I knew that it was not only the flute that the shepherd Bouscarle had shown me by guiding my fingers over the holes in the reed, but all of life:
    â€œDon’t think about playing, and then you will play . . .”
    I looked at myself in the pool. I did not recognize my face. From a boy I had become a man; from a man I had become a shepherd. The radiance of my sweat dazzled me.
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    AT THAT point, the shepherd’s voice changed as he offered me some dried figs.
    â€œAnd then, I have six nice fresh poivre d’âne cheeses. If you’d like some.”
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    WE TOOK up summer quarters in a high pasture in the vicinity of the Croix pass. The glaciers had taken this whole area in hand and raised it up to the sky. Great frozen fingers held grass. It was rich enough to make any healthy beast mad. The meadowsweet was as thick as cream and the soles of our espadrilles turned green from its juice just from walking in the pasture.
    I spent long days lying on my back, sucking on my flute, from time to time pushing out some little curling note. My blood grew calm. But I stored up my experience, and more and more, especially in the evening
hours, I thought of the words of Bouscarle and I heard the step of the great gods.
    I drank from the sky in long mouthfuls, like water from the pool of that fountain where I’d seen the first rays of the shepherd reflected back at me.
    The sheep were spread throughout the valley and on its slopes. They reached right to the edges of a